After Irwin Allen's notorious 1978 flop The Swarm, many in the movie world decided not to work with children, animals or bees. Now, fortunately, comedian Jerry Seinfeld has reversed this thinking with his very entertaining film. It's been almost 10 years since Seinfeld left a centre-stage position in American pop culture by concluding his eponymous sitcom in 1998 (and ceding the comedy crown to his former co-writer Larry David) while keeping a relatively low profile, apart from the gripping 2002 documentary Comedian, about his return to playing live shows.

Seinfeld's big-screen starring debut is not as an actor; that was never exactly his strong point, and he may have borne in mind Garry Shandling's uneasy appearances in movies after The Larry Sanders Show. Instead, he has co-written, produced and voiced the lead role in a completely ridiculous and very enjoyable animated satire about the wacky world of bees, which features a non-stop parade of silly bee-related puns: there is, inevitably, a cameo for Sting so that the bees can denounce the presumption of this human's "prance-about stage-name".

Seinfeld and his co-writers Spike Feresten, Barry Marder and Andy Robin give us a stream of apian gags maintained with enormous invention and flair, culminating in a very funny and visually inspired sequence in which a colony of bees guide an aeroplane to the ground, so that it lands in the manner of, well, a bee. And, amid the wisecracks, there's some smart satire about the world of work, and the workers' alienation from their labour: shrewdly questioning the spirit of the beehive itself.

Seinfeld's lead character is Barry, a bright-eyed and idealistic young bee who, after a few days' childhood and a few more days' young adulthood, is ready to graduate into the world of work, a life of uncomplaining drudgery in an orderly, regulated, hexagonal universe. Seinfeld's querulous, squeaky voice - octaves away, surely, from the classical buzz - is very plausible for his character who, like an observational comic, is nettled and exasperated by the quirky things about his own situation that he keeps noticing. Perhaps the phenomenon of the insect that makes something humans want to eat is something which can't help but attract the attention of a comedian. As Eddie Izzard rhetorically asked: "Do earwigs make chutney? Do spiders make gravy? What is going on?"

Barry yearns to join the elite corps of bees whose job is to leave the hive to get the pollen. He manages to fly along with them and is entranced by a vision of freedom such as he has never known. Barry finds himself entangled in the world of humans and, of all people, befriends a florist called Vanessa (voiced by Renée Zellweger). She is strangely attracted to tiny, vulnerable Barry, who offers her the emotional support that she isn't getting from her boyfriend. They share a loathing for artificial flowers. Barry says disdainfully: "There's nothing worse than a daffodil that's had work done!" I think it's the best single line in any film this year.

Things turn dark when Barry realises that he and his bee comrades are being systematically exploited by the humans. Corrupt corporations like Honeyburton and Hunron are imprisoning bees in man-made hives and gouging them for every last precious drop of honey. Peter Singer and George Orwell combined could not match the scorn with which Barry denounces this practice, and especially the cruelty of fooling the incarcerated bees into thinking that they are being ruled over by a proper Queen Bee, who is clearly some sort of quisling male bee in disguise: "That's a drag Queen!" squeaks Barry.

Barry launches a sensational class action lawsuit against the human honey producers, demanding freedom and a proper share of the profits: "When I'm finished, they won't be able to say 'Honey, I'm home' without paying a royalty!" Barry also demands an end to the demeaning practice of using bears to advertise honey - because bears are the bees' cruel oppressors, disagreeably roaring and clumsily swiping their precious produce.

"D'you think these multi-billion dollar food corporations will have good lawyers?" he asks at the beginning of the trial. Despite his naivety, Barry's crusade is a success, but with far-reaching consequences. Bees become infatuated with the new concept of leisure. Bees start idling and loafing around. Flowers don't get pollinated, and the eco-system crashes - and all because of one little bee with a dream.

What a treat to see a comedy that starts funny, is funny in the middle, and ends funny - unlike the usual Hollywood model in which all the humour is used up in the first act setting up the premise, and then winds down into sentimentality. Seinfeld's hero is an unpretentious, regular guy, an Everybee who raises some important questions about the world of work - with a lot of bee-ish play on words. Does work validate our lives, or negate them? Does the worker truly exist, or not? It occurs to me that there's a quotation here from Hamlet that might be appropriate ...